Aegean Airlines

Now it has a live network of five hundred plus merchants across more than twenty-five destinations.

He has a partnership with the Aegean Airlines as well as Marketing Greece, which is something, uh, really interesting because it's a sort of three-way, I would call it a four-way partnership as well, and, and that seems to be a model that a lot of cities can actually copy.

His track record led him to build an airline-ready white label version on the same idea.

So, so we've got two companies actually running in parallel, and we'll sort of figure out what they share in common and what they don't.

There was really no way for us to ever collect that insight.

But because we know that, what can we do? Should we do more cross-marketing campaigns with the Japanese tourism board? What does flight connectivity between Japan and Greece look like? Are there opportunities for us to tell a more cohesive story around travel and different destinations in different times of the year for potentially? So really, really interesting data.

And then essentially, as part of this partnership, what was also very interesting is we were approached by Aegean Airlines, uh, who of course is the national carrier of Greece.

And they saw yet another opportunity that we did it from, uh, this platform, which they said, "Of all these travelers who are coming to Greece and claiming their free Global Nomad Pass, we're very curious to know how many of them booked their flight to Greece with Aegean versus with some of our competitors." You know, how many of them are coming in with Ryanair or EasyJet, for example.

...

in the Aegean, isn't it?

An- ancient Samos was Italy.

I think, I think Samos is an island-

Fucking vamp, vamp

...

I'm pretty sure Samos is an island in the Aegean.

I haven't got my phone with me, but-

Yeah, too soon to tell 'cause we're kind of in that slow end-of-the-quarter period, so we have to see what comes in.

We do have Aegean Airlines, um, the, uh, still yet to report.

They're, um, a laggard as, uh, they often are.

Um, I don't...

So I come at these issues originally as a practitioner who had worked with refugees and displaced people.

But it was actually on a vacation to the Aegean coast while I was working in Turkey that led me specifically to the topic of mass expulsion.

I was with some friends and we were hiking.

And we came upon some ruins, and there was a sign that said this was a former Greek town.

So the Uganda-Kenya case is what we would call a cross-case comparison.

But as you mentioned, my book also examines within-case variations such as this Ottoman case.

So here the paired comparison is looking at the target group of the Greek Orthodox Christians expelled from the Aegean and Pontic Littoral, the coasts, as well as Anatolia, but not expelled from the imperial capital of Istanbul.

And this is puzzling because the Greek Orthodox Christian population that was living in Istanbul at the time was the wealthiest of all the Greeks, the most politically active, and after Greece invades what then becomes Turkey in 1919, the most irredentist of all the Greek Orthodox Christians in the empire.

The glory of the king was what mattered, and that entire apparatus of the Egyptian state, the lives of thousands of people, existed to serve that glory.

When we think of the heights of the Late Bronze Age, the glittering and sophisticated world that would soon collapse, a brotherhood of fellow kings extending from the Aegean to Mesopotamia to the Cataracts of the Nile, this was its political reality.

Corpses strewn across a dust-covered battlefield, grist for the mill of royal propaganda, a message written in blood about the power of the king to shape the world to his whims.

This was where abstract processes of state formation and growing kingly power inevitably led.